War

In 1941, fifteen-year-old Lina, her mother, and brother are pulled from their Lithuanian home by Soviet guards and sent to Siberia, where her father is sentenced to death in a prison camp while she fights for her life, vowing to honor her family and the thousands like hers by burying her story in a jar on Lithuanian soil.

Eager to escape his dull life in Ireland and have an adventure, 12-year-old Patrick devises a plan to use his older brother's identity to join the army; but when World War I breaks out, Patrick experiences much more than he ever expected and has to muster the courage of a man to do his duty and survive what lies ahead.

The critically acclaimed novelist adds to his Civil War novels, Nightjohn and Sarny--both classroom favorites--the story of Charley Goddard, a Minnesotan who enlists at age sixteen expecting adventure and returns with a soldier's heart.

An authoritative narrative reveals President Lincoln as the nation's first hands-on Commander-in-Chief, whose appreciation for the power of technology played a critical role in the North's Civil War victory over the less developed South.

In 1968, with the Vietnam War raging, thirteen-year-old Lyza inherits a project from her deceased grandfather, who had been using his knowledge of maps and the geography of Lyza's New Jersey hometown to locate the lost treasure of Captain Kidd.

Dreaming of being a pilot her whole life, Ida Mae Jones sees her chance during World War II, but she cannot be accepted into the WASP because she is black, forcing Ida Mae to choose between her racial heritage and chasing her dream.

In 1943, a British fighter plane crashes in Nazi-occupied France and the survivor tells a tale of friendship, war, espionage and great courage as she relates what she must do to survive while keeping secret all that she can.

Presents a provocative anthology of fiction, speeches, poems, and essays about the nature of war by such contributors as Rita Williams-Garcia, Mark Twain, Bob Dylan, Ernie Pyle, Helen Benedict, and others.

After living in an Catholic orphanage for nearly four years, Felix, a naïve Jewish boy, runs away, and embarking on a journey across Nazi-occupied Poland to find his parents without any comprehension of the war raging around him.

Living with a foster family in Germany during World War II, a young girl struggles to survive her day-to-day trials through stealing anything she can get her hands on, but when she discovers the beauty of literature, she realizes that she has been blessed with a gift that must be shared with others, including the Jewish man hiding in the basement.

In 1943, sixteen-year-old Erik Brandt experiences the horrors of war when he is drafted into the German army and sent to fight on the Russian front, but he must keep up his charade to survive when he puts on a dead man's uniform and poses as a wounded Russian.

In 1915, mortally wounded in Loos, France, eighteen-year-old John Kipling, son of writer Rudyard Kipling, remembers his boyhood and the events leading to what is to be his first and last World War I battle.

Fleeing from his abusive parents during World War II, sixteen-year-old Kak enlists in the Canadian Air Force and is sent on a special mission aboard a plane called B for Buster, where he discovers the truth about war and forms an unlikely friendship.

After his plane is shot down by Hitler's Luftwaffe, nineteen-year-old Henry Forester of Richmond, Virginia, strives to walk across occupied France, with the help of the French Resistance, in hopes of rejoining his unit.

A searing portrayal of modern warfare recounts a 1993 firefight in Mogadishu, Somalia, that resulted in the deaths of eighteen Americans and more than five hundred Somalis, examining the rationales behind the disastrous raid.